On the Web Builder Zone there's a recent article comparing one of the PHP IDEs growing in popularity, NetBeans, and one of the standbys of the development world, Vim. It compares how they both stack up for PHP development work by things like features, speed and ease of use.

Since this is an old religion war and it can't be solved out of context, my points will be specifically related to these programs. In this comparison, I collected examples of where Vim and NetBeans differ in behavior and performance. The point of view is that of a PHP developer, since I experienced much worse results with Unix tools while programming in other languages such as Java.

He compares them on a few different levels including overall speed, autocompletion, portability, ease of use, codebase navigation and versatility. There's no "better than" judgment here, just a good look at what each tool has to offer. What it really boils down to, of course, is personal preference. These are just two of the many possibilities out there (like PHP Storm, Eclipse PDT or Zend Studio).